Yes, and thats not a problem, as you can just add or remove padding as needed. The problem would be if its significantly bigger. Or if it was so small that it would fit inside the part that has a transparent plastic film, rather than being stopped by the hard plastic, because I'm not sure that the film would last that long with the pressure of the device directly on it.

I don't think the screen matters that much. Most people who drive with a GPS probably relies a lot more on the voice instructions than on what the screen displays.

Maemo has Ovi Maps already. At least the N800 does, I assume they didn't remove it in the maemo 5 version of the OS.

You probably don't have to pay to use the hardware. Freeware GPS apps can probably access the GPS fine.

There are good free maps too. What you have to pay for is probably maps that has built in navigation metadata so it can calculate how you should drive. Those costs a bit more to produce, and those are what nokia are now giving away for free, which is what this story is all about. Which is no different than buying software for a computer, even if you already bought the computer.

I have this waterproof casing for my N800: http://www.otterbox.com/handheld-pda-cases/2600-series/2600-series-pda-case/

Waterproof up to one meter, and it floats so no worries about loosing it in the water. Also shock resistant and crush resistant. I bought it many years ago for the palm I've used then, and I was happy to see that the N800 was also usable in it. I hope the N900 is as well since I plan on getting one at some point, but it should be, since its about the same size.

I use my N800 as a GPS outside sometimes, and use this so I don't have to worry about dropping it in a moist terrain or if it starts raining. I also use it for reading ebooks when taking a bath.

So a smartphone/pda doesn't have to be unusable in conditions like the ones you describe. Altough I'm not sure if you could make phonecalls while its inside the shield, it might block the sound waves too much. Touchscreen devices work great on it, since one side has a soft transparent plastic film over where the screen is. Buttons on the front work well trough it too. Buttons on the side or top are not reachable however.

I did some tests with mine, among other things leaving it at the bottom of my bathtub for 24 hours with something heavy on it to make it stay at the bottom. No moisture got in.

So pdas/smartphones aren't necceserily useless in the conditions you describe, you just have to have the right gear for it.

That makes sense to me. Denoising can be done much better when you have the data from the raw image than when you have already converted. Sharpening is the same either way, so you could just as well do it in gimp or something, so a raw program doesn't need to include it. Also sharpening should always be the last thing you do, because it doesn't turn out nearly as well if you do it earlier in your workflow (And I mean the last, after doing all modifications, and resizing. The only thing left to do when you've sharpened the image should be to hit the save button and close the program.) And since most people probably do some final touch-ups in an image editor after having the image converted from raw, it makes sense to do the sharpening in the image program, rather than doing it prematurely. For myself I made a small shell script that uses ufraw-batch to convert raw files to images using settings that usually produce good results for my camera. Then it uses imagemagick to do some other things, including applying a small unsharp mask. Works pretty well. I only open ufraw and go trough the whole process manually for images that turned out exceptionally well.

If you read some of the other comments you'll see that linux has had multiple free software raw-processing programs for many years. There are at least two plugins for gimp, one for dcraw and one for ufraw. And there are professional photographers that use them.

Thats not entirely accurate. Ufraw has for a long time included a batch tool called ufraw-batch. Try running that command it if you have ufraw installed and see for yourself. The idea is that you process one image in the series in the normal ufraw gui and save the changes you made as a template to a config file (thats what that button in the ufraw gui is for). Then you have ufraw-batch load that config and process as many pictures as you like. I tried rawstudio, but it kept crashing for me. Been using ufraw for two years, and it works great here. I don't think the UI is confusing.

Its command-line only, thats probably why you missed.

So just because we haven't been able to recreate Jurassic Park in reality it means we don't have proof that dinosaurs existed?

Don't click link in parent post. The page has javascript or something that connects to the freenode irc network and does something malicious. Seems to be exploiting a security flaw in freenodes servers that allows you to connect to it using HTTP post.

Troll? It was meant as a joke :(

You can also try this tool which works even better.

That may be. But its still turned off for me, since I have history disabled.

I had to choose the "its turned off" option. But not because I dislike it or anything. In fact, I've never tried it. But I happen to use the vimperator addon, which changes the firefox ui completly, in a way that lets you effectively do all your browsing using only your keyboard, using vim-like bindings and features. So the firefox address bar isn't even there for me (in vimperator you type the url in the status bar, nice because it saves screen space).

The way to handle this in firefox is to create separate browser profiles, one locked down for online banking and other stuff where you need extra security, and one for causal browsing. This is more secure than the way IE handles it.